For Love
by meldahlie
Summary: Healers require at least an 'E' in Herbology. They train for years. Then how did Healer-in-charge Strout fail to notice the Devil's Snare sent in to murder Broderick Bode?


For Love

_A/N: You can blame this cheery little piece on a heady combination of Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' and Steven Spielberg's 'Schindler's List.' _

_Thanks (again) to Vivienne Lestrange because I have borrowed her Death Eater Healer (again)...!  
_

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When the Aurors asked, I told them I had always known him to be a highly competent and ethical Healer, although a few patients had expressed anxieties. They nodded, smiled, thanked me. Then they went, and I was left alone to mourn the man I loved, for who comes back alive from Azkaban?

He had, I knew, a wife. He had, I suspected, others beside his wife. But that did not stop me. His wife did not love him, I could see that. I was not sure she had it in her to love anyone. Beauty, yes, she had that. With insanity and cruelty screaming out from every fibre of it. She did not love him, not as I could have loved him. Loved his steady hands; his refined, ascetic face; his thoughtful, reasoned care of each patient, even those who were not destined to linger long in this world.

I loved him. But I could not tell him so, as trainee Healer under his tutelage. That would have been unethical. And he was ethical, above all else. I loved him for that too. What he had undertaken to do, he would do, no matter how it conflicted with the other pressures raging about him. He was always calm, his hands always steady. I used to watch his hands so very, very closely as we worked together. He told me I was a good student, a good Healer. 'Attentive' was the word he used. It was after that day, that he first shared his theories with me, the observations he'd made, the conclusions he'd drawn.

I agreed with him. Not just because I loved him, but because the facts, the figures, spoke for themselves. True witches and wizards are stronger and live far longer than muggles. "The likes of you and I," he said, and I smiled to hear us linked so closely together, even in speech. He had the data to show this, survival and recovery rates for both his own ward in St. Mungo's and a comparable ward at St. Thomas's muggle hospital, for he was thorough, that brilliant brain they flung into Azkaban to rot. Not like his wife, not like his younger brother. How could they do that to him?

But the poorest survival, the worst lifespans, were the muggle-born. "It's too much strain," I said, watching his finger tracing down the figures. "The combination – they can't sustain the, well, unnatural addition of magic to their systems." He nodded, smiled at his good student who could see the truth so clearly (how could you not?). I watched him roll the parchment up, tuck it away within his robes, and smiled back. "Something ought to be done," I added hastily, to keep him there a little longer.

And he nodded again. "Perhaps, one day – the likes of you and I..."

Perhaps, one day... It was not unethical to learn all that I could – did I not say he was a highly competent Healer? And if that included ideas he shared with only a few? I was glad to learn, to listen, to watch him every precious second. The way he moved, his quiet voice, the slight gesture of his left wrist that was the gesture of comradeship between himself and his fellows. I knew not what it meant, but I longed to be part of it, to be one of his fellows.

It was not to be, then. But on Christmas Day, a person I did not know came to the ward door, handed over a plant. "Fer Mister Bode," he drawled, and then touched his left wrist lightly. I had not been blind to the stirrings in our world again, to the discrete reappearance of those who believed in the same thing as the man I love. And so I took the plant.

There is no evidence against me. I will not suffer for his cause, as he has suffered for it. 'The likes of you and I,' is not 'the likes of us.' We are not fellows. But I am his student. I would be more. The least I could do was take that plant. I pity the family of Mr Bode, but I do not regret what I did.

I would do it again.


End file.
